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Alfred A. Knopf (1976). xviii + 482pp. including index. More than 1,000 illustrations in 47 pages of photographs — 16 pages in full color. 5.5 x 8.5 inches. Hardcover. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 394-49635-3.
.From New York's world-renowned American Museum of Natural History comes this incomparable guide to shells — the first to include, in a single volume, not only the sea shells of the Eastern Seaboard of North America, from Nova Scotia to Florida, but also the land and freshwater shells of the eastern United States and Canada.
And, in the Museum's great tradition of making scientific knowledge easily available and fascinating to the layman, this beautifully illustrated and authoritative book provides the basic information that the novice or expert collector needs and wants about the 800 most commonly encountered shells, from the False Jewel Box and the Jingle Shell to the Ponderous Ark, the regal-pink Queen Conch and the exquisitely colored Florida Tree Snail.
Throughout, the material is organized and typographically arranged with the reader's convenience always in mind. And it is the special joy of this book that its authoritative, fact-crammed text is at once elegantly concise, thoroughly practical for the shell hunter, and rich with the lore of shells. You learn, for example:
In sum, a magnificent and definitive guide, in a class by itself, both for its extensive information about where to look, what to seek, how to identify and know the treasures you find — and as a book to browse in, a conchologist's journey into miraculous worlds.
William K. Emerson has been a Curator at the American Museum of Natural History since 1955. Until recently, he also served as Chairman of the Department of Living Invertebrates. Among his published books are two others with Morris K. Jacobson: Shells from Cape Cod to Cape May (the 1971 revised edition of their earlier book, Shells of the New York City Area, 1961), and Wonders of the World of Shells: Sea, Land and Freshwater (1971).
Morris K. Jacobson is an Associate in Malacology with the Department of Fossil and Living Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History. He was for many years a teacher of German, Spanish, and French, and served as head of the Foreign Language Department of Andrew Jackson High School in New York City. He has written articles for several magazines and journals and is the author of the article on shell collection in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Jacket photograph by Irwin Horowitz.
Jacket design by Lidia Ferrara.
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